Xerox Ventura

Ventura Publisher was the first popular desktop publishing package for IBM PC compatible computers running DOS. The software was originally developed by Ventura Software, a small company founded by John Meyer, Don Heiskel and Lee Jay Lorentzen. It ran under an included run-time copy of Digital Research Corporation's GEM Desktop. The first version was released in 1986.

Ventura was distributed by several companies, but after a while Xerox became the only distributor and in 1989 they even bought the source code. Ventura Software Inc., an affiliated company of Xerox, was formed and version 3.0 Gold was published in 1990. Besides DOS/GEM it was also available for Win16, Mac and OS/2. Version 4.0 was released in 1991. The last version released by Ventura Software Inc. was 4.1.1 in 1993.

The application was acquired by Corel in 1993. It was repackaged and soon released as Corel Ventura 4.2 without any major change in the application. The first real Corel version was 5.0, released in 1994.

The application was rewritten for the Win32 platform and was released in 1996, labelled Corel Ventura 7 (instead of 6) so that it would match the version number of CorelDraw.

Corel Ventura 8 was released in 1998. The next and up to now latest version is Corel Ventura 10. As an application with strengths in more structured documents, its main competitor is Adobe FrameMaker.